You use a fancy keypad lock? Check your batteries.

Today one of our fiber nodes went offline, this took 120 homes/businesses offline mid day about 3PM. The building we have a dedicated IT closet with dedicated power, cooling, multi hour battery backup, secure entry was dead.

The rest of the building is being renovated as a private high school. The electricians were in the process of stripping the breaker panels and they simply pulled all our circuits out!

The electricians assured us they had restored power, but we were still seeing red alarms everywhere on the dashboards.

To add to the fun, the door lock to this closet has an electronic keypad with a fingerprint reader. We didn’t install the device; we prefer mechanical keys for infrastructure. The batteries were dead. Nobody knew where the backup key was (we always use the code, so why keep track of a key?)

So after 30 minutes of calling people to find the dam key, I had enough. We cut a hole through a side wall and were able to open the door and worked with the electricians to restore power and get everyone back online. We were moments away from a 2” chain to the door lock and pulling it out with the F350 in low 4. Honestly, the F350 dragging the door down Ericksen Ave would have been much more satisfying, but likely not as clean of a solution.

Bottom line, if you use a keypad, check your batteries. Replace them if you don’t remember when you last did and put a sticker on the side with the year that you should replace them next.